PowerPoint is a wonderful that presenters can use to make their presentations more effective. Below are five tips you can apply when using PowerPoint in your presentation:

Make sure that the images you use stand out. They should be relevant which means they support your goal and the message your conveying to your audience. This way, they can easily remember the lesson you’re teaching even long after your presentation is done.

Go for simplicity. The more simple the slides, the better. Avoid using complicated graphs and charts as well as long texts.

Make sure that your audience knows the meaning of the acronyms and difficult terms you use.

Make sure your audience can resonate and relate well with your audience. Don’t just use general photos. If you are talking to a group of teachers, use photos of different schools they know or pictures of the campus where they teach.

Would you like to use open shapes in your presentations? They look hand drawn, look interesting and could add spice to your PowerPoint presentations. However, they don’t come with PowerPoint, but with the use of Bézier Curve (Edit Points) feature, you can make this possible. It is not that well-known a feature because it’s not on the ribbon but you can do everything using the right-click menu.

Ellen Finkelstein actually shared a video on how this can be done.

She also enumerated a step-by-step process on how to create open shapes.

Last week, I’ve shared with you how to collaborate in PowerPoint presentations. This is part II – another way that you can make your collaboration. You can actually post your presentation on Office Online (which was previously called Office Web Apps). Though the online version of PowerPoint is lacking several features present in the desktop version, simple editing can still be done.

How do you use Office Online?

You just have to start your computer by first using the desktop version of PowerPoint and then you go to the online version.

Office Online will let editors do their edits simultaneously. This way, all concerned can work on the presentation all at the same time. You can see all the changes being made which will make presentation collaboration easier.

Do you know that there are two ways to collaborate with others on your presentation using PowerPoint? Emailing each other about updates and edits on your presentation can get pretty confusing fast because it’s hard to keep track of the latest changes. So what can you do instead? Below are two things you can do to make collaboration a lot easier when it comes to presentations.

1. Add comments to presentation – By adding comments to a presentation, all parties involved can have a chance to write their opinions on how to make the presentation better. They can suggest changes and edits that need to be made.

2. Compare two presentations – Once you have two similar presentations that went through suggests, edits and changes, the Compare feature will show you the differences between the 2 presentations.